Wildsided

Hey Chris, I just gave the short a watch and there's a lot of promising stuff going on there. I love the overall concept, although I was unsure if it was meant to feel sinister or maybe melancholy. You've got some nice looking particle effects going on, did you do those in A:M or in After Effects? I'm no expert but for what it's worth I'd say you could make the hair on the characters much more lifelike by using a different texture, the current one on the girl doesn't seem to work as hair. I totally get where you're coming from about becoming impatient when animating, but as you said yourself the animation would benefit from some more time being put into it. It looks like you've used a combination of a texture and hair for the grass. It might look better if you crank up the density of the grass/hair so you see more of it than the texture. Although that would increase render times. Also I love the wind blowing through the longer grass, that looks great. Anyway, If you either plan to go back to this one and tweak it or to move on to something else, I look forward to seeing more of your stuff. P.S Did you write the music for the short? I saw you played the piano in the credits. If so, hats off to you.

I was working on the décor for Bernie's room and decided he needed a sound system. At roughly the same time I remembered that this Special Topics section is called Ace.Co Entertainment. Sadly A.C.E has been defunct for quite a while now but I decided to let its spirit live on as an electronics manufacturer in the Bernie series. Introducing the Ace.Co Electronics MX-2006DNK

Never mind, I fixed it. the choreography's glow value had somehow been set to 200% and when I set it to 0 the bright aura went away. This doesn't explain why models that didn't have any parts of them assigned to glow were glowing. But at least it's fixed for now.

Does anybody know what I might have done to cause this? To my knowledge, I didn't change any settings and now all of a sudden Bernie and Nellie's faces are glowing. I think it must have something to do with hair because without it on things look fine.

Just checked and it renders fine in 32bit as well. Must have been a glitch, glad it's working for you anyway.

I get this if I do a screen render

He's neat, I love his belly 😁

I'm using my Granddad's house as a base for the one Bernie lives in and the room I have allocated as Bernie's really wasn't all that big, roughly 10ft x 10ft. There were 4 rooms on the second floor. A bathroom and 3 bedrooms. There were two pretty big rooms and that one little one that I assume was a guest bedroom (although granddad had a train set in there for a while when I younger.) The cobble stone is a decal using a tile set I found online. It came with diffuse (colour), normal, height (displacement) set to 1000% and specular maps.

Not posted in a while so here's Bernie and Nellie hanging out in Bernie's W.I.P bedroom. Still, so much work to do, not to mention the fact I have to finish actually writing the first book.

The like button disappeared a little while ago for everything. No idea why.

Looks good, Robert. Was that spiky test at around 36 seconds deliberate or did something go amiss?

Oooh sparkly. We approve of sparkly here at Dan, Dan and Dan Incorporated.

Is that using 'thermo' shading, Simon? Or is it the lights?

That is a nice bit of medal right there.

The GPU is a Baytrail from what I can tell The tablet is an Asus Vivotab Note 8 with the OS updated Windows 10. It's not a powerhouse by any means but I can run office on it and photoshop as I mentioned. I've got it connected to a Zagg Autofit Keyboard and a USB hub so I can hook up a mouse. I've also set up a Playstation Move Navigation Controller paired with a program called Xpadder that lets you assign keys to the buttons on the pad which gives me a 12 button shortcut controller. So far A:M seems to be fine with rotoscopes, haven't tested any image sequences yet. Rendering is pretty quick on less demanding models. All I really want to be able to do with it is transfer whatever model I'm working on to it and work on them while I'll watching telly on an evening.

Just did 😁, testing now. Early impressions are that it works and am surprised to see that pinch zooming is supported.

I put in a trial request, sent off my host id etc, a few days ago but haven't heard back. I've bought a Windows tablet with a Wacom Digitizer for drawing and working on when I'm not at my main computer. Photoshop works great on it and I've seen a video of somebody using Z-Brush on it but I know A:M doesn't always play nice with Intel onboard graphics and want to test it before I get a license. I'm gonna be on a plane for 7 hours this coming Saturday so was hoping to tool around on A:M during the flight.

Work in Progress of Bernie's teacher, Mrs Cassandra Burrows.

When you installed it did you have to enter your new serial? Sorry if that sounds like a silly question but if you just re-installed the software over the top of your current install your current master.lic will still be in effect. Usually, when I renew the subscription it has completely expired. Then I delete the master.lic in the animation master install folder. The next time I launch the software (because it can't find master.lic) it asks for a serial number. Then I enter my new serial and it generates a new master.lic in the A:M folder and the new subscription takes effect. Hope that makes sense.

Well the icons themselves are much smaller. Those pictures are just smaller versions of the 1000 x 1000 renders I used to make them. Also what was the biggest icon?

I don't know if anybody would want to use these, but I whipped up some higher res AM shortcut icons because the ones that come with the software go a bit blurry and misshapen on my desktop. AM_icon.icoAM_icon_64.ico

I used a screen grab from that site to roto a 1-inch diameter 24 tooth cog. It's not got bevelled edges or anything so I don't know how suitable it would be for 3d printing but the teeth intersect properly. Gear.mdl

Don't know if this would make things easier but according to this simulation site http://www.thecatalystis.com/gears/ A 'sun' cog with 24 teeth would need 3 'planet' cogs of the same size with the same number of teeth which would save modelling.

if you could find a view from directly above you could rotoscope the teeth so they're proportioned properly and then do a lot of copy/paste rotate. then you could scale them to size. If that makes sense. Sorry if it doesn't.

Congrats to all the winners and great job on the video, Robert. Loved your used car salesman jacket.